


Pilgrim Souls

by kiev4am



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 08:20:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17260811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiev4am/pseuds/kiev4am
Summary: Men of a certain age reflect gratefully on light, warmth and the passage of time.  Written - better late than never - for the Terror 12 Days Of Carnivale event, Day 9, 'By Candlelight.'  Happy new year!





	Pilgrim Souls

Francis wakes with a start from a nebulous Arctic dream. It's among the gentler ones, memories brushing like paint-strokes at the far ends of his nerves: the glare of a sun-dog, the crunch of footsteps beside him, the dark bite of an officer's cap against the light… Gentle or not, though, it has hooks; for a moment after his eyes open he remains haunted, aware only that he is not _there_ ; his eyes rove blindly across the room, registering only its close warmth and gilded darkness as if the years are skeins of clouded glass and he is still behind them. Then he blinks, hauling himself straight, feeling the worn mould of his chair like a grounding anchor. Not close; _home_.

His gaze greets the dying glow of the fire in the hearth, the soft throng of candles arrayed on shelves and tables, moves like a fumbling hand across the mantlepiece, finding each dusty keepsake like the touchstone that it is: a framed sketch of a cathedral ruin by Henry Le Vesconte, a scrimshaw whale's tooth from Thomas Blanky, a bottle-ship from Henry Collins, a brass compass from Thomas Jopson and a paperweight from Edward Little on either side of the little stack of Henry Peglar's caricatures, John Bridgens' latest poetry pamphlet, Harry Goodsir's most recent nature tome, Sophia's wry and wildly popular new novel. His eye lights last on the smallest ornament, perched in pride of place atop the books: a little boat carved from soft pale stone, proud and perfectly balanced, gleaming like rose quartz in the candlelight. Its creator never knew the taxonomy of Royal Navy vessels but its draught marks it clearly as a bomb ship, a _Terror_ or an _Erebus_. Personally, Francis thinks it closer to _Terror_. Though it was not his gift, he has never looked upon it without the urge to reach, to touch, to press it to his forehead like the benediction that it is; even now, disinclined to move, he stares at it as if it is a fortune-teller's bauble, a window on the world it came from, as if he could send his heart's fathomless gratitude and esteem out through the humble shape, beyond the miles of ice, to wherever Silna is if she yet lives. He hopes she lives, he hopes indeed: a wise woman, an elder of her people, a storyteller, a guide and witness. For a moment Francis is still, remembering, a sacrament. The candlelight is kind and warm as velvet. Then, as always - saving it for last, like a covetous child - he turns his head to look across the hearth.

James Fitzjames at sixty is both commonplace and a marvel. Everything he was, he still remains: long, tall, legs stretched out, a louche elegant draped silhouette in the armchair, his tailored clothes - grey trousers, silken waistcoat, undone shirt - still vexingly aristocratic, his face a Gothic wonder in the firelight. But the clothes hang a little hollow now, and the creases that bracket his smiles are as deep as knife-cuts; his hair is iron-grey but he keeps it long, tied in an old-style queue; it pulls back somewhat from his forehead, and this besides the drawing-tight of thin skin over cheekbones and long nose gives his face a hawklike, fierce air that it never had in youth. Ever raffish, he sports the tiniest and most delicate of half-moon spectacles, sliding to permanent half-mast when he reads; the fingers that keep place within his book are spindly, thin as twigs. He sits still, still in the chair, the light bathing his eyeglasses orange: asleep before the fire just as Francis had been, though with fewer excuses - seventeen fewer, Francis thinks fondly. Stealthy, easing his cramped and aching knee, he stretches out one leg to jog James' foot; and as he does so the light upon James' lenses flickers, his book folds closed, and he smiles.

"I thought you were asleep," Francis says softly.

"Just waiting for you to wake up." James' gravelly voice has only roughened with age; it catches sometimes, a heavy hull in shallow water, something felt more than heard.

"You'll ruin your eyes, reading in naught but candlelight."

James waves a bony hand at his side-table. "Nonsense, Francis. One candle would be foolish, but here I have five. Good enough for a medieval monk to write by, I'm sure it's adequate for me."

Francis gives a rusty laugh, shaking his head. It's an old argument, visited purely from habit, for James loves candles with a stubborn romantic extravagance - buying the paper-wrapped bundles in bulk, hungrily browsing market stalls, glassmakers' and curiosity shops for candlesticks, lanterns and ornamental snuffers, trimming and replacing the burned-down tapers as carefully as a gardener tends his seedlings. His preference for candles over the now-ubiquitous gaslight is no mere vanity; it has old roots, deep-tangled and painful. Once the sight of open flames, however homely, would have sent James into a pallid sweat even as his wracked body craved the warmth; the spectre of Carnivale was a poison that only time could lance - time, and James' typically quixotic response. No sooner had he recognised his trouble than candles became his gauntlet, his private highwire act; each match, each spark a Carnivale in waiting, held back only by his own care and vigilance. Tight-jawed at first, hands trembling, he'd surrounded himself with flames like little sabres; made a pet of his fear, courted and challenged it every nightfall, held it in the palm of his hand until the darkness twisted out of him at last. James has long since made his peace with those memories but the candles remain, their ghosts quiet now, kept for comfort and grace and because the past, for all its anguish, is holy.

Now he looks lazily at Francis, eyes creased with affection. "I read half my book. You've dozed the whole evening away."

"Mmm, well." Francis stretches, unrepentant. "Festivities will do that, at my age."

"If you call a circuit of the park and a good meal 'festivities,' I despair of you."

Francis grins, scrapes at the salt-white scruff of beard he ought to trim. "We can't all be such expert walkers, James." It's a very old joke, worn soft as a penny, and James rewards it with his slow and beautiful eye-roll. Then he carefully puts aside book and glasses, unfolds from the chair's depths - stiff as a crane, grumbling - and once upright, holds out his hands. Francis leans back, looking at him, then reaches up and lets James pull him from the chair's embrace. His back complains, his leg bemoans the absence of his stick, but they are distant, irrelevant voices against the dark shine of James' eyes in the candlelight. They stand quiet, close, their hands at rest upon each other's hips. When James speaks at last, his voice is so low that Francis feels the shake of it through his breastbone. A wildness in it, like disbelief.

"Twenty-five years."

Francis finds he cannot speak and so he laughs, hoarsely. Festivities indeed, an anniversary. No ceremony to mark; instead they celebrate a conversation, date reckoned as best they can - somewhere on the ice-gnawed fringe of King William Land, sometime in the last days of their rescue and recovery, before the walk to Resolution. And what a frozen, halting, wind-muddled thing it was, Francis thinks in helpless amusement: two fools sitting on two crates at the far edge of camp, stumbling towards it, not daring to name it, almost as tortuous and ill-mapped a journey as the one they'd hitherto been leading. A wonder that we managed it at all, he thinks; but even as he tries for humour he feels his throat close up, his eyes treacherously burning. The usual hank of James' hair has come loose, falling across his forehead in a charming, rakish echo of his youth. As Francis pushes it back, James' eyes follow it to his retreating hairline and he snorts.

"That'll go," he says wryly. "My father was bald as an egg when he died. So I'm told."

"Perhaps you'll take after your mother, then."

" _And_ the teeth. What's left of them. I'll be keeping them in a jar by the bed before you know it."

Francis cackles. "Don't forget your woeful eyesight." He peers up at James, appraising and impish. "Though I suppose there's one boon in your persistent abuse of it with candles; you won't see _my_ deterioration. I've something of a head start, you know."

James leans closer, resting his weight against him. Francis tightens his arms, supporting him with ease; for all his frailties his body remains a captain's, sea-hammered and tough; he stands foursquare, obdurate as a tree - which is the point that James is making. Francis feels him laugh. "Well, when you put it like that, perhaps I _should_ mind my eyes," he mumbles. "I would hate to miss anything."

"You'd sooner witness my decrepitude in detail?" Francis jibes.

James straightens. His eyes are filled with light; on the brink, Francis realises, of overflowing. Very slowly he reaches out, traces the arch of Francis' eyebrow with one finger, and Francis sees the harsh convulsion of his throat. "Everything," James whispers. "Every mark the years have laid on you… every line, every ache or weakness... it's gold, Francis. It's _time_. Time I thought you'd never have, days I thought you'd never see - "

With a formless sound, Francis pulls him into his arms. In an instant they are both _there_ \- flung backwards through the years onto the pitiless ice, their minds chilled, stunned by cold, shrinking from it yet powerless to forget. The wind keens, the tents flap. Tin plates scrape, men cough endlessly, abject as sobs. Red upon white, flashes of horror in a land without shadows. And then, as always, they bring each other home. Francis' hands flatten at James' back, James rests his forehead on his, their breaths slow together and at last James dredges up a shaky laugh. Francis presses his wet eyes to James' shoulder, rocks him gently on his feet as if to wake him. When he looks up, he sees candles.

They will put them out carefully, circling together around the room; all but one, which Francis will carry down the hall. One last light for James, in the last of the day; enough light to see him by, when they lie down together.

**Author's Note:**

> I just… really needed these two old men together. The title comes from the W.B. Yeats poem 'When You Are Old,' whose first two verses read as a beautiful ode to an ageing love. I was looking for an apt quote, knew the poem but hadn't read it in years, and this sprang out and grappled my heart with little Fitzier hooks:
> 
> When you are old and grey and full of sleep,  
> And nodding by the fire, take down this book,  
> And slowly read, and dream of the soft look  
> Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
> 
> How many loved your moments of glad grace,  
> And loved your beauty with love false or true,  
> But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,  
> And loved the sorrows of your changing face
> 
> (The third and final verse makes clear that this is a love that didn't last, so I'm doing what I already do with inconvenient canon and ignoring it.)
> 
> Also, I know sixty isn't really _that_ old, but I wanted to hit the 25-years-later mark, starting from 1848, which would put them at sixty and seventy-seven respectively.
> 
> This absolutely is in [Stories Yet To Tell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15602193) continuity.


End file.
